March 1, 2006

How to make favicons

Someone asked me how "to add a logo next to your url in the address bar of the browsers" — a good question. Those little icon-like items are called favicons, which I can only guess is a contraction of favorites (e.g., sites bookmarked in your brownser) and icon. (Well, if it isn't, there's the start of an urban legend … mea culpa.)

Favicons are little images with a .ico extension (e.g., favicon.ico), but it's not enough to make an image and switch the extension to .ico.

There are different ways to make favicons. My favorite is via a Photoshop plugin called ICO Format from Telegraphics.com.au. Of course, if you do a quick search for "favicon", you'll get quite a selection.

Once you've made your favicon, upload it to your server, then call it from each of your HTML pages via a bit of code in the <head> section:

And that's it.

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2 Comments to "How to make favicons"

Daniel Aleksandersen says:
Comment posted on 06/8/06 @ 6:29 am

You might want to check out FavIcon from Pics.

It is a free, online service which converts regular images into favicon.ico's.

Really nice tool!
Diane Vigil says:
Comment posted on 06/8/06 @ 12:22 pm

Hello, Daniel. Yes, HTMLkit's favicon maker is an option; thanks for mentioning it.

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